All this kind of stuff is rad. And it's not the kind of thing I would have ever thought of. I mean, five years ago? The idea would have seemed incomprehensible. And yet, it is so incredibly useful.

I've actually used GoogleDocs before. For a while, I was managing the 'swaps' section of a website. So if someone had something they didn't want, they could swap it, for money or another product, with someone else. And in doing that successfully, you got swap points, which proved to other people that you were worth swapping with. Anyway. Long story. When I took over the whole thing, I had to be e-mailed all the files, save them, and then keep editing them at home. But that meant that if I had a spare five minutes at some point, when I was not at home, I couldn't do anything with them. So I set them all up in GoogleDocs, which let me fix them up anywhere I wanted, and when I passed the whole thing on to someone else, I just had to give them the gmail login details, and they could work from there. Simple. Straightforward. Easy.

I imagine it will be some time before libraries even consider getting rid of their Microsoft products and instituting GoogleDocs or similar - it involves too much fiddling around with more logins, and, also, Microsoft Office is an institution. For better or for worse, we have it (though if I was in charge we'd be using OpenOffice, but that's another story). Still, I do absolutely recommend GoogleDocs to customers who don't, for example, have a USB memory stick on them, but want to be able to save their documents somehow. E-mail also works, but the real benefit of GoogleDocs is being able to access them from anywhere, whatever the software installed on the computer. We do loan out USB memory sticks (I think it's a one week loan, on their card, same as for any item), but if they have the internet at home, I tend to recommend GoogleDocs.

It's also useful for me, as an employee. Sometimes, when I'm writing an important letter or document, I want to be able to sit down without interruptions, and just finish it off. If I work on it in GoogleDocs, then, I can take it home with me without any kind of compatability problem (I have a Mac at home, see), and do some of it there. It also means that I can share documents with coworkers, and we can work on things together even if we're not in the same building or location, or even working on it at the same time. I love that kind of flexibility.

Utilities like Zamzar are great, too, and I wish I'd known about that one in particular sooner. We had a problem for a little while because people have been showing up with docx files, created in the latest version of Microsoft Office - which we don't have. There is a utility you can install to allow the version we have to read these documents, but because our computers are locked down against software installation, we can't actually use it without getting IT to install it for us. Which was painful for a while, because we kept having to tell people that we just couldn't open those files. But using Zamzar? We could just convert them to doc files, and to be done with it. Easy. And there are so many file formats it can work with! I'm really impressed.

I had a look at Zoho, which I'd never touched before, to see how it compared to GoogleDocs. It definitely does a lot more, but it's also, therefore, a little more complicated. That said, it's not really any more complicated than using the Office equivalent, except that it's a little be different in layout. I really do like the convenience of just being logged in to one account (my gmail account) for everything, but I'd be tempted to use Zoho anyway, just because it has so many more features - and I am a feature girl.

All of this is food for thought, anyway. We're moving further and further away from external storage devices, I think. None of our computers here at work have a floppy drive, for example. And if you look at computers like the Eee PC or the Macbook Air, well, they don't even have a built in CD-ROM drive. Using something like GoogleDocs or Zoho means that you don't need huge amounts of storage on your computer, either, because it's all stored online. It makes a lot of sense to me, as connections get faster, and bandwidth bigger.